Bunch digs into the political debates and machinations of the time to explain how this has driven the country to the position it finds itself in today. But a string of student protests in the late 1960’s - regarding the draft, civil rights issues, discrimination and woman’s liberation - created an atmosphere in which some saw education as a threat (to white supremacy, for example) rather than something offering a positive benefit to society. The immediate post war era was a time in which egalitarian aims held sway over those seeing the profit potential on offer. The result was, of course, a huge expansion in the number and scale of colleges. Then when the baby boomer generation, spawned by the war’s conclusion, was added to the mix an exponential growth in the overall number of students attending college was confirmed. He explains how sceptics were proved wrong in their prediction that many returning soldiers would simply accept the benefits on offer but would fail to complete their courses. Bill significantly expanded not only the number of students experiencing further education but also radically changing the age profile. The author takes us through a history of further education in America from the end of WWII, explaining how the introduction of the G.I. Should colleges seek to expand a student’s broad education or should the primary focus be to prepare them for an identified career path?Īnd what about, so called, blue collar jobs – what’s the route for students wishing to learn a trade? Has the cost of higher education in America now made it a club for the richest families only? Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Will Bunch poses a number of pressing questions here and proposes some interesting solutions too. Thank you to Harper Collins and NetGalley for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review. I can only hope that this book will make it into the hands of those who can make that happen. He advocates for principles including universality, seeing education as a public good rather than an individual benefit, and a liberal arts education which will help us see problems with a wider lens.

He calls for a Truman-style commission on higher education to come to some agreement on what we want from higher education in the future. The changes Walker made may affect Wisconsin’s education for generations.īecause of my personal stake in the matter, I believe what Burch has written is true and necessary. My colleagues and I were literally on the front lines, protesting, writing letters, and working social media in support of academia. This is an era I lived, painfully, when I was teaching at a UW system school. In fact, Chapter 7 is almost exclusively devoted to Scott Walker’s tenure as governor of Wisconsin, where he busted public education unions, weakened tenure, and even tried to rewrite the mission of the University of Wisconsin. Many in my family have been academics, including me, so this information hits close to home. There are also a few heroes, but they don’t show up until the end, and he doesn’t even touch the need for colleges themselves to reform curriculum, staffing and many other issues now that they have bent themselves into pretzels trying to accommodate the whims of various legislators over the years. There are many villains, ranging from those who wish to turn colleges into profit-making institutions to those who prefer a society where students only learn what they need to learn in order to serve the needs of employers. Bunch comes at the commonly cited flaws of higher education from economic, political and social angles- sometimes flowing in and out of each other, sometimes issues that need separate attention - and makes a good case that the current state of affairs is due to both deliberate manipulation and unintended consequences. This was a difficult book for me to get through - not because it was poorly written or inaccurate but because it examines the issue of higher education in such detail and complexity that it was hard while reading to imagine that this is a problem that can be easily solved.

Blue collar vs ivory tower